Saturday, February 1, 2014

More building fun

The second and final RS-232 board came in. The big change was an SSOP line driver in place of the SOIC one. I also decided to use the super-bright LEDs on it, just for fun. There's no missing them when they blink!

The first prototype on the bottom, the new one on top.

I still don't know what to do next. I can sell them for about $15 with low parts purchase quantities, but that doesn't include a case or a µUSB cable. I could lower that price if I were making thousands of them, but what market there is for USB-to-RS232 cables is saturated.

The other thing I built was the final version of the i2c RGB LCD backpack display. As a reminder, this is like the OpenEVSE display, but instead of just a SELECT button, I've included a 5 way tactile switch and a piezo element supported by the LiquidTWI2 "buzz" method. You can also change the i2c address of the GPIO chip with 2 way solder jumpers and you can change the common backlight pin from common cathode to common anode with another. In fact, this prototype is hooked up to a SparkFun RGB LCD display that has a common anode backlight. You just need to change an initialization constant in your LiquidTWI2 setup and it works exactly the same way.